These vanities harmonized with character and circumstance.  The joy of living was then expressing itself in an overwhelming sense of beauty, and in material splendour which, unlike the material splendour of to-day, never overstepped the standard set by the intellect.  Taste had become a triumphant principle, and as women grew in dignity and importance, they set a higher and higher value on the compelling power of dress.  They had no more doubt on this score than had wise Homer when he hung the necklaces around Aphrodite’s tender neck before she was well out of the sea, winding them row after row in as many circles as there are stars clustering about the moon.  No more doubt than had the fair and virtuous Countess of Salisbury, who, so Froissart tells us, chilled the lawless passion of Edward the Third by the simple expedient of wearing unbefitting clothes.  Saint Lucy, under somewhat similar circumstances, felt it necessary to put out her beautiful eyes; but Katharine of Salisbury knew men better than the saint knew them.  She shamed her loveliness by going to Edward’s banquet looking like a rustic, and found herself in consequence very comfortably free from royal attentions.

In the wise old days when men outshone their consorts, we find their hearts set discerningly on one supreme extravagance.  Lace, the most artistic fabric that taste and ingenuity have devised, “the fine web which feeds the pride of the world,” was for centuries the delight of every well-dressed gentleman.  We know not by what marital cajolery Mr. Pepys persuaded Mrs. Pepys to give him the lace from her best petticoat, “that she had when I married her”; but we do know that he used it to trim a new coat; and that he subsequently noted down in his diary one simple, serious, and heartfelt resolution, which we feel sure was faithfully kept:  “Henceforth I am determined my chief expense shall be in lace bands.”  Charles the Second paid fifteen pounds apiece for his lace-trimmed night-caps; William the Third, five hundred pounds for a set of lace-trimmed night-shirts; and Cinq-Mars, the favourite of Louis the Thirteenth, who was beheaded when he was barely twenty-two, found time in his short life to acquire three hundred sets of lace ruffles.  The lace collars of Van Dyck’s portraits, the lace cravats which Grahame of Claverhouse and Montrose wear over their armour, are subtly suggestive of the strength that lies in delicacy.  The fighting qualities of Claverhouse were not less effective because of those soft folds of lace and linen.  The death of Montrose was no less noble because he went to the scaffold in scarlet and fine linen, with “stockings of incarnate silk, and roses on his shoon.”  Once Carlyle was disparaging Montrose, as (being in a denunciatory mood) he would have disparaged the Archangel Michael; and, finding his hearers disposed to disagree with him, asked bitterly:  “What did Montrose do anyway?” Whereupon Irving retorted:  “He put on a clean shirt to be hanged in, and that is more than you, Carlyle, would ever have done in his place.”